"It's
visually pleasing and an easy film to like, even
if it never gets out of shallow water as far as
its story goes."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Tim Burton's ("Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure"/"Beetlejuice"/"Batman") sweet but bizarre
fable is a fantasy comedy updated take on the
Frankenstein story. It's visually pleasing and an easy
film to like, even if it never gets out of shallow
water as far as its story goes. The main thrust of the
fable is exposing the exotic gentle freak to the
boring middle-class suburbs and seeing how they relate
to each other, with the monster being the sympathetic
innocent and society being the one to fear because of
its evil nature. It's taken from a story by Burton and
Caroline Thompson. The fantasy tale is set circa 1960.

Edward (Johnny Depp) is the man-made creation of an
elderly genius inventor (Vincent Price) who died
before finishing his would-be companion and left him
with large pruning scissors for hands. Spending many
lonely years in a vast musty gothic castle that sits
on a hill atop a suburban town, Edward is visited by
an overly upbeat Avon lady, Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest),
desperate for business thereby taking an alternate
route. She feels sorry for the well-behaved, lonely
and freakish looking lad (adorned with an
electric-shock hairdo and a black leather outfit, and
an appearance that is a cross between Michael Jackson
and a punk rocker), and takes him home to her 'normal'
suburban family that consists of her wry humored
husband Bill (Alan Arkin), pretty high school
cheerleader daughter Kim (Winona Ryder) and son Kevin
(Robert Oliveri). The bourgeois neighbors live in a
tidy neighborhood that features assorted
pastel-colored tract houses, and all act as
stereotypical suburban families with gossiping
housewives and dull bread-winners. There's also a
fanatical religious nut (O-Lan Jones) and an oversexed
lady (Kathy Baker) doing their thing in the 'burbs.
Edward's unique scissors allows him to become an
instant neighborhood celeb when they see he's harmless
and can carve exotic lawn hedges and do neat hair
designs for their pet dogs. The socially stunted
teenager quietly falls for Peg's pretty daughter Kim,
but she finds him at first monstrous and prefers her
insensitive bully boyfriend Jim (Anthony Michael
Hall). One night Jim tricks the guileless Edward into
helping him rob his parents’ house. When the cops
arrive, he abandons him. Suddenly the once popular
Edward is viewed as an outcast and a freak by all his
former fickle friends, as they all abandon him except
for the nurturing Peg and her kind husband Bill. Kim
ends up having a special feeling for him, but never
sees him again after taking him back to his castle for
safety.

The heartfelt fable is framed around a bedtime story
that Kim, now a grandma, tells her grandson. It ends
up being a melancholy tale that critiques human nature
and conformity; but it's much more hopeful of society
than the Frankenstein story, as this time the town
might ban together to go after the alien but they are
dispersed through deception by Kim before they can act
like a lynch mob. Maybe the lesson here is that if one
wants to be different or creative (like a Hollywood
filmmaker), being cunning is a necessary ingredient
for success.